For Smokey and I, as preteen brothers, churning butter took too much time from a Saturday afternoon. We had usually completed our morning duties and wanted the rest of the day to play along the creek or in the barn, but when our mother called us, we knew the churn would be on a small table in the carport not far from the kitchen door, and thick cream would already fill half the glass jar. In hindsight, the classic country chore bred appreciation for the process of getting heavy, creamy butter to the dining table.

From the 13th chapter of Growing Up Floridian:

Lulu’s bounty in milk and cream allowed us to make butter, cheese, and ice cream. The butter was produced every weekend the cow was fresh with a hand-driven churn. Cream, poured off the top of the milk containers every day, went into a separate gallon jar. Typically, on Saturday afternoon, the square glass churn with wooden paddles on a steel rod that descended from a hand crank mechanism was filled with the cream. Although the churning only took fifteen minutes or so, unless there were two containers of cream, a chore was a chore. Rich yellow butter magically appeared after cranking the handle as evenly as we could for a quarter hour. My mother shaped the soft gob into a rectangle, and, if we already had enough butter in the refrigerator, wrapped the latest batch in white butcher’s paper for storage in the freezer.

I am not a synesthete, a person who was born with a perceptual phenomenon in which the stimulation of a sensory or cognitive pathway leads to an automatic experience of a second sensation. I don’t see colors with letters or words, taste an emotion, or get an uncomfortable tactile response to hearing fingernails on a […]

After seeing two different magnificent Red-tailed Hawks on golf courses last week being attacked by mockingbirds and crows, I was reminded of one of those spectacular moments in nature I have seen periodically throughout my life. When I was twelve, my father, offered such a good deal that he could not pass on the opportunity, […]

A NPR Morning Edition news report last September by Jessica Meszaro, “Meat Industry Turns Florida’s Feral Hogs Into Prime Pork,” reminded me of my encounters with wild pigs on the Quarter Circle A ranch in Manatee County in the 1950’s, particularly shortly after my family moved onto the ranch in 1957. My father quit his ranch […]

Vick Blackstone would have loved participating in the Great Florida Cattle Drives. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1987, eight years before the first of the three reenactments of Floridian cattle drives that the Florida Cow Culture Preservation Committee under the auspices of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and the Florida Agricultural Museum […]

Even before the Manatee County school bus slowed to a stop in front of the dirt road leading over the railroad rail cattleguard at the entrance to the Quarter Circle A ranch on State Road 62, my brother, Smokey, and I looked out the opened windows and scanned the small four-acre pasture in front of the […]

One evening on a recent trip to the north Georgia Mountains, firefly flashes reminded me of the rare times I witnessed lightning bugs on spring nights in Manatee County, Florida. My brother and I were often sent to bed shortly after dark, so perhaps fireflies appeared more often than my childhood memories suggest, but I […]

If a tiny hawk hovers over an open grassy area in Florida between May and July, that little bird, or more accurately, falcon, is a Southeastern American Kestrel. The northern migrant species has already left for cooler climates. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation contends “recognizing the difference between the two subspecies solely by physical characteristics […]

When Juliet asked Romeo, “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day. It was the nightingale, and not the lark,That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear,” during a reading in my ninth grade English class, I thought I could easily picture the lark, but I had no image for the nightingale. I […]

Long before I had ever seen a print of and read a discussion about Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, I listened to and watched for real nighthawks in the 1950’s evening skies on the Quarter Circle A ranch in Manatee County, Florida. Hopper’s 1942 oil on canvas painting captured people metaphorically as nightbirds in a downtown diner […]

What we, as humans, do not know about dragonflies, which have been around for more than 300 million years, is substantial. According to an NPR report on the studies of Martin Wikelski, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University in New Jersey, “Dragonflies are long-distance fliers that travel similarly to migrating birds,…build up […]

In Florida, the Eastern Fox Squirrel and the Striped Skunk can be mistaken for each other, particularly if the squirrel is one of the dark color variations. Both species have an habitual behavior of walking through grass in an ambling fashion with their bushy tails arched up over their backs to the back of their […]

“The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow written in 1840, the first poem of any substance I remember from Parrish Elementary School, struck me as a fairly accurate physical description of my father. He did not have a smithy, but he did often work under large oaks to avoid some of Florida’s brutal sun. He […]

Sailfin mollies can be found fresh, brackish, and coastal waters all over Florida, but most people I have pointed them out to were unaware of their existence. A minnow is a minnow to many…and if someone only sees a group of female sailfins, he or she might easily dismiss them as slightly larger than average mosquito […]

My mother must have been inspired more than a bit by Ranch Romances, Thrilling Ranch Stories, and Rodeo Romances, pulp fiction magazines that began publication in 1924 and ran through 1971. According to Chelsea Anderson, “Ranch Romances was only one of more than 180 western pulp magazines created between 1920 and 1950 , and only a small part […]

Vick Blackstone walked like a cowboy, talked like a cowboy, and dressed like a cowboy because he was the epitome, in my mind, of what a veteran cowboy should act and look like. Actors who portrayed cowboys on television like Clint Walker, Chuck Conners, James Garner, James Arness, Clint Eastwood, and Robert […]

Jimmy Buffett captured the essence of hurricane season in his 1974 song from A1A, “Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season,” when he sang, “Squalls out on the gulf stream Big storm commin’ soon…” My closest experience with a hurricane occurred in 1968 when Hurricane Gladys passed the Pinellas peninsula on Friday, October 18th during my senior […]

The original Sunshine Skyway Bridge, opened in 1954, did away with the need for the Bee Line Ferry boats that transported people and cars from Pinellas County across Tampa Bay to Manatee or Sarasota County. Jerry Blizin revisited the event in an article in the St. Petersburg Times published on October 20, 2009. The extra 50 miles […]

The current edition of Rodeo News features the article, “Back When They Bucked with Pat Ommert” with her picture from a performance years ago, which, in turn, reminded me of the years spent on the Quarter Circle A ranch in Manatee County, Florida with Faye and Vic Blackstone, who are both in the Cowboy and Cowgirl Halls […]